Gotta catch 'em all: Pandemic sends prices soaring for Pokemon cards

LOS ANGELES — Pokemon is all grown up, and so are its prices.

Two decades after the Japanese trading card game became the biggest thing in schoolyards around the world, Pokemon cards are fetching six figures at auction in a boom that appears to have been fueled by coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.

“When COVID-19 hit, a lot of Gen X and Millennials were looking for things to do and we found a lot of these guys and girls started playing Pokemon again because they grew up with it,” said Joe Maddalena, executive vice president at Texas-based Heritage Auctions.

Maddalena said boxes of the 1999 U.S. first edition base set had sold for around $400,000 at auction in recent months. A single card in mint condition for the popular fire-flying character Charizard sold for $300,000 in January, whereas in late 2019 asking prices for a Charizard card were around $16,000, he said.

Once stuffed into pockets or thrown into toy boxes, Pokemon cards have become so sought-after that long lines form outside stores when new batches are released.

“It’s crazy, because I know just a few years ago you could go anywhere and there were walls of Pokemon cards and it’s just all come back,” said Megan Meadows, 29, who lined up outside the Next-Gen Games store in Los Angeles last week.

“For me, personally, it’s nostalgia 100 percent. I was a big Pokemon kid in the late 90s, early 2000s, and it’s also finding that joy again in a time where joy is a little hard to come by and it’s kind of pure and fun,” she added.

As Pokemon gears up for its global 25th anniversary celebrations on Feb. 27, Heritage is holding its first auction dedicated to Pokemon cards. The Feb 25 - March 25th online auction will have 200 Pokemon lots, including what Maddalena called “the Holy Grail” - a sealed, 1999 Wizards of the Coast base set.

“The last one, we sold for $406,000 - who knows what it could go for?,” he said.

But you don’t need to be rich in order to play the game or collect the cards. Maddalena said the upcoming auction will have lots of cards at lower prices than those in mint condition that go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Maddalena hesitates to use the word investments.

“I’m hoping they buy them because they love them,” he said.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Additional reporting by Rollo Ross; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

-reuters-

Taiwan grandpa catches 'em all playing Pokemon Go on 15 phones

TAIPEI - Chen San-yuan turns heads as he cycles through a suburb of Taipei, Taiwan's capital.

The reason why?

Attached to the front of his bicycle are 15 mobile phones which Chen, 70, uses to simultaneously play the augmented-reality game Pokemon Go.

The smartphone-based game requires players to 'catch' animated characters that appear in real locations.

Known as Pokemon Grandpa, videos of Chen and his fan-shaped phone setup cycling between "Pokestops" have gone viral on the internet and made him a minor celebrity in Tucheng district, where he lives.

"I used one cellphone and then kept playing and playing," Chen, dressed in a crisp, white long-sleeved shirt and pants, told Reuters Television on a recent outing.

"After a month, it became three cellphones, six cellphones, nine cellphones, 12 and then 15," he said, crediting his grandson with introducing him to Pokemon Go in 2016.

Chen said his gear cost more than $4,800 and he spends about $300 a month on virtual currency to use in the game.

Playing on multiple phones allows him to get to higher levels in the game more quickly and capture rarer creatures, he said.

The pensioner said he sometimes plays all night thanks to the custom-made portable battery packs that recharge the phones.

Chen's fellow players are amazed at his energy.

"He's able to take care of fifteen cellphones at once," said Shih Wun-sheng, 45. "From going out until returning home, Chen can remain energetic for six to seven hours, not feeling tired. That's really impressive."

Pokemon Go, jointly developed by Nintendo Co and Niantic Inc, has been the biggest hit so far among games using so-called augmented reality, where digital characters are superimposed on the real world. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Pokemon Go spurs lifestyle changes, business boom as it rolls out in Asia

JAKARTA - Asian fans of smartphone game Pokemon Go are hunting out the best telecom providers and network gear to overcome the hurdle posed by patchy network signals in their race to capture virtual cartoon characters.

From Indonesia to Hong Kong and Cambodia, the wild popularity of Nintendo's augmented reality app is also driving lifestyle changes for many gamers, who must trudge through real-life locations in their quest.

The game launched in many Southeast Asian countries on Aug. 5, a month after the United States, New Zealand and Australia, but enthusiasts are finding they must first vanquish shaky transmission signals.

In Indonesia, Muchamad Syaifudin, a 29-year-old bank employee, said he switched to a mobile carrier offering better data packages, while his friends snapped up modems, at a cost of $20 each, to lock on to the signals.

"We can bring the modems to play, especially at places where a signal is hard to find," Syaifudin told Reuters by telephone.

He and his friends living in Central Java, a province famed for its idyllic paddy fields and mountains, used to spend leisure time playing strategy games at home.

But now, armed with the new devices, they increasingly venture out to catch the Pokemons that appear at temples and other landmarks where people gather.

In Hong Kong, commuters are hopping on the trams known as "ding dings" in their forays, while in countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the U.S. State Department has sent tweets warning players to beware of unexploded wartime mines.

The game officially launched just two weeks ago in Indonesia, but tens of thousands of enthusiastic adopters among a population of 250 million had started playing earlier, using proxy sites to access app stores elsewhere.

Gamers are fueling a boom for modem makers, such as PT Smartfren Telecom, whose nationwide sales of 4G modems, priced around 300,000 rupiah ($23) each, have jumped five-fold in just two months.

The firm has launched new devices with bigger battery capacity, Derrick Surya, Smartfren's vice president for brand and marketing communication, told Reuters.

Retailers also benefit as more gamers seek devices to power up mobile connections and minimize the expense of data packages.

"More and more customers are looking for alternative sources of additional mobile network capacity," said Billy Cahya, a salesman at an electronics shop in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

Also surging, however, is the demand for game innovations, ranging from new characters to a higher maximum level players can reach, said Syaifudin.

"Looking for Pokemons, looking for items, battling at gyms...We have done that again and again," he said, referring to game sites where players stage contests between virtual characters.

"It probably needs a new concept to retain our interest."

Other players complain rural areas have few Pokestops, or stockpile sites to secure equipment needed to catch Pokemons.

"We have fewer Pokestops in Legazpi City compared to metropolitan areas," said Rey Anthony Ostria, a player in the Philippine city about 340 km (211 miles) from Manila, the capital.

"In towns that I have visited, there's almost none."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

LOOK: Cafe serves Pokemon-themed latte art

MANILA – Gotta drink ‘em all!

Local café Refinery is letting customers enjoy a latte featuring Pokemon characters such as fan favorite Pikachu. Coffee prices range from P140 to P160 per cup.

On top of this, Refinery’s branch in Rockwell, Makati is also a Pokemon Gym. The café also has a branch in Greenhills, San Juan.

Pokemon Go was launched in the Philippines early this month, causing people to flock to public places as they attempt to catch as many virtual creatures as they can.

Various establishments in Metro Manila and beyond have embraced the Pokemon Go fever, giving away prizes to players who share their in-store run-ins in social media.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Hooray! Nintendo shows sneak peek of new Family Computer

After 33 years, Nintendo is giving the older generation of gamers something to be excited about while their kids go wild with Pokémon Go: the all new Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Classic.

NES, also popularly known as the Family Computer, is the quintessential parent of every home console gaming device that we know today.

If you’re a millennial, you’ve probably heard about what the NES is, during hushed conversations between your parents who are no longer as familiar with the games you play on your PlayStations, Xboxes, and Wiis that they bought for you. They spoke about a legendary console that game them hours of fun playing pixelated sprites of monkeys, ghosts, plumbers, Eskimos, vampire hunters, elvish warriors, and female cyborg fighters.

Powerful machine – 30 years ago

It was called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) or Family Computer (Famicom) in its native Japan. Back in the day, it was an 8-bit gadget powered by a 1.79 MHz processor. If that number seems small, it’s because it is. Your smartwatch would have more processing power than 1000 of these things running at the same time.

But the NES had a reason for being. It was the starting platform of many video game characters that are remain popular to this day. The Super Mario Bros started on the NES, Donkey Kong’s first home version was on a NES, Mega Man first shot to fame on it, and people saw the fantastic world of Hyrule of the Legend of Zelda series on this machine.

The NES operated games on cartridges – storage devices that are older than tape, itself a device that many young people of cloud services would most likely call “Jurassic.” But the hard plastic game cartridges featured cover images that were as good as artwork, which is why owners would keep the original packaging pristine.

Its controller only had a total of five items to press: 4-way direction button, A and B buttons, and Press and Start buttons. Plus, it needed to be physically attached via a 2-meter long cable. Compare that to the gazillion buttons, knobs, and switches on a wireless PlayStation 4 controller. It was as simple as it could get but more than enough to provide hours and hours of 2D fun.

Retro is back, baby!

The new NES Classic is a miniaturized version of the NES console that had once been a staple appliance underneath a CRT TV (that’s cathode ray tube for you, millennials). It’s so small that it can be carried with one hand. In fact, it is the size, weight, and thickness of two NES cartridges put atop each other.

While it still looks and feels like the real NES, the NES Classic no longer uses the near-extinct yellow RCA port (who still uses these ports, anyway?!) but now sports the extant HDMI cable so you can play it on your ginormous ultra high-definition TV.

The NES Classic also no longer needs a cartridge; it comes pre-installed with 30 of the most renowned NES titles during its time (Pac-Man and Punch-Out! are already worth the price tag, which we’ll come to in a few).

The classic black-white-gray-red design of the controller is also back and is still the same size as the original. Most youngsters now would have a hard time even fathoming the solid square design of this controller, especially the perceived threat of the sharp corners, but older generation of gamers know that you’d never stop playing on this controller even if you already are suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome.

And now for the price. According to Nintendo this retro gaming device would sell for US$59.99 (about Php2,700) or about the price of a current generation game. Surprised? You should be because this thing cost US$300 when it was launched in 1983 -- nearly US$800 in today’s money. It had the price tag of three Xbox Ones.

The NES Classic would be officially sold in stores on November 11.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com